Tag Archives: Stephen Wright

As usual, this Overland is well worth reading. Two articles stand out for me:

Transgender justice by Eliora Avraham. Noting that the mainstream media’s fascination with transgender didn’t start with Caitlin Jenner (I remember being fascinated by an article on Christine Jorgensen while my mother was under a dryer in a hairdressing salon in the mid 1950s), the essay moves on to a discussion of economic discrimination against trans people, and makes an interesting contribution to the debate about whether calling an event for women, say, ‘Pussy Power’ is oppressive to those trans women who have penises. The essay makes an excellent companion to the recent episode of the Jill Soloway’s TV series Transparentwhere the Jeffrey Tambor character is shattered to discover that only ‘women who were born women’ are welcome at the Wimmin’s Music Festival. Apart from occasional moments such as the bald characterisation of some disagreers as purveyors of hate speech, the case is argued carefully and respectfully all round.

Are Australian universities creating good artists? by Lauren Carroll Harris, an excellent general article on the state of art education under neoliberalism in Australian universities. The writer attended the institution now known as UNSW Art and Design, and perhaps it’s an interesting product of the rivalries and snobberies the permeate the art education scene that she fails to mention the National Art School in Sydney as a surviving studio-based tertiary art education institution. Likewise, no mention of the recent evisceration of art education in TAFE NSW.

There’s a lot more besides. Sophie Cunningham has another study of urban USA in Gold Rush, about the politics of murals in San Francisco’s Mission District. Stephen Wright’s column On male fear does a nice turn on sexism as a key concept in addressing domestic violence. Alison Croggon’s reliably elegant column defends vulgar language as often less vile than perfectly polite words (an argument that has turned up in the newspapers recently in New South Wales as prosecution of profanity is coming under question). In The excellence criterion, Ben Eltham lays out the arguments against George Brandis’s recent proposed changes to arts funding – proposals not substantially changed by Brandis’s departure from the ministry. Facebook absolution by Laurie Penny makes me seriously consider quitting facebook before it’s too late.

There’s Peter Minter’s last selection as poetry editor, with joanne burns (‘fate curves like a recycled / frisbee in search of destiny’) and John Kinsella (‘I hear no birds at night / through thick concrete /and the lack is critical’) heading the bill.

This is a special Aotearoa / New Zealand issue of Overland. It isn’t so much about that country as by writers from there, in the belief, as Giovanni Tiso, regular columnist and guest editor of Nº 219, writes, ‘that this difference, this shift in perspective, can be a value in itself’.

This probably isn’t the kind of shift Tiso had in mind, but John Clarke is here, in an unfamiliar persona. With none of the satirical deadpan of his Clarke and Dawe TV spots, he gives us The things she did, a biography of his remarkable mother Neva Yvonne Morrison Clarke McKenna, who died this year. Everyone should be able to write about their mother with such deep respect and pleasure.

A number of this issue’s articles address familiar themes with a fresh twist:

Settled peacefully by Morgan Godfery discusses issues our two settler nations have in common. I had thought Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s recent remark that before 1788 Australia was ‘unsettled or, um, scarcely-settled’ was an unfortunate misspeak. But Godfery quotes his own Prime Minister John Key, ‘New Zealand was one of the very few countries in the world that were settled peacefully,’ and Stephen Harper’s announcement that Canada has ‘no history of colonialism’. One is a journalisic gotcha; two is a coincidence; three is a sign of what James Baldwin, quoted by Godfery, called the ‘habits of thought [that] reinforce and sustain the habits of power’.

Faisal Al-Asaad’s In a rage almost all the time discusses recent events in Ferguson and elsewhere in the USA in the context of globalisation and the politics of occupation, drawing out the correspondences between Palestinian resistance and US anti-racist activism.

Catriona MacLennan’s The ethics of defence tackles a subject that has been much discussed: the ordeal that defence lawyers often inflict on women who allege rape, while the accused has the right not to take the stand. Her list of commonly held false beliefs about rape (she calls them myths) is not novel, but it clearly bears repeating, since she quotes a number of cases where they emerge – still – from the mouths of judges and lawyers:

1. false rape complaints are common, frequently being made by lying and vindictive women as a means of punishing or getting back at men
2. women’s behaviour or clothing are a justification for rape as men are ‘led on’ by skimpy female clothing and are unable to control their sexual urges
3. women who consent to sex at night wake up the next morning regretting it and make false rape complaints to cover their regrets
4. real rape is perpetuated by strangers in dark alleys; sexual assaults on wives or girlfriends are not really rape – if a woman has consented once to sex with a man, she has consented in perpetuity
5. women make up false complaints of rape against famous men to try and extort money
6. women who are out alone or without men at night are foolish and it is understandable if they are raped
7. women who are drunk or have used drugs are to blame if they are sexually violated
8. where sexual conduct occurs at teenage parties after drinking, it is simply experimentation and a prank and not really rape
9. if the survivor has no obvious traumatic physical injuries she has not been raped.

She argues that the ethics of defence lawyers need to be re-examined, and goes a step further:

We should … consider moving to an inquisitorial rather than an adversarial legal system. The inquisitorial system aims to get to the truth of a matter through extensive investigation and examination of all evidence. By contrast, the adversarial system is a competition between the prosecution and the defence to make the most compelling argument.

I have a lawyer friend who tells anyone who will listen that a prosecutor’s duty is to discover the truth of a criminal matter, that his adversarial relationship with the defence is secondary to that duty. The notion that the adversarial approach is paramount is, he argues, true of the US system, and we think it holds here because we watch so much US television. I sent him the url for this article. His emailed response, which I take to refer to the argument for inquisitorial system, was brief: ‘Just rubbish. What more can I say?’ Perhaps the New Zealand system is closer to the US one than ours. Catriona MacLennan is as much a barrister as my friend. Maybe they should have a cup of tea some time.

Evidently the question of free speech is as significant across the Tasman as it is here. It’s nice to have it discussed in At a price by Max Rashbrooke with reference to Milton, Mills and eminent legal philosophers rather than to Andrew Bolt, Alan Jones and the Institute of Public Affairs. Nice too to read Loose lips, in which NZ investigative journalist Nicky Hager reveals trade secrets on how to find and protect whistle-blowing sources.

‘Pass the ta’e please’ by Scott Hamilton is a fascinating account of kava and politics in Tonga, from traditional ritual use among high-ranking men to current use by rebel artists (ta’e, the Tongan word for excrement, is their word for kava). By no means the main point of the article, but one that provided an odd shift in perspective for me, is that Futa Helu, ‘Tonga’s most important modern intellectual’, was part of the Sydney Push as a young man: who would have thought that that circle of dedicated drinkers and talkers I knew in my youth had contributed such a force to Tongan culture and politics?

There are poems, too, and short stories (one of which does that irritating thing of revealing only at the end that it is an excerpt from a novel in progress), and a small but creditable Australian presence, including regular columnists Stephen Wright and Alison Croggon: the former’s On backyard cricket is a splendidly deranged rant about successive Federal governments’ treatment of child refugees (‘Australia appears to have become a nation governed by people who proudly engage in legalised child abuse, torture and neglect’); the latter’s On the intellectual life of a nation offers some acerbic home thoughts from an enviable writers residency abroad (‘The problem is not with the quality of work that is made here. Au contraire! Australia has the oldest living culture on the planet, and the contemporary work Australians produce is as worthy of notice as anything that emerges from other centres. It’s more in its mediation, in what art is assumed to be in the wider culture.’).

The editor has gone, long live the editor. With this edition of Overland,Jacinda Woodhead, who has been deputy editor for a while, takes over the main job. Most of the old editorial and design staff remain, and there has been no radical transformation.

For example, like the previous edition, this one includes the results of two writing prizes. These are the Nakata Brophy Short Fiction and Poetry Prize for Young Indigenous Writers, and the Judith Wright Poetry Prize:

The judges praise the winner of the former, Backa Bourke by Marika Duczynski, for its ‘energetic prose that knows when to withdraw’. What looks like a rough and ready outback yarn about floods and death and young men on motorbikes takes a surprising turn right at the end, in prose so withdrawn that the surprise hangs on a single word. To be parochial for a moment, I was chuffed to see that the writer, in this overwhelmingly Melburnian journal, lives in Sydney.

Peter Minter’s judge’s report on the Judith Wright Prize pays elegant tribute to Judith Wright herself in reflecting on form in poetry as ‘a moral or ethical problem, a political gesture’. Interestingly enough, the first prize winner, Hyper-reactive by Melody Paloma, has a similar linguistic vigour to ‘Backa Bourke’.

This issue is also like its predecessors in including writing about writing (including an essay on literary envy/jealousy that takes its title from the Clive James poem that begins, ‘The book of my enemy has been remaindered / And I am pleased’), and an interesting mix of short stories, this time two realist pieces and two that nudge into the surreal.

The issue differs, perhaps accidentally, in having an identified theme. Jacinda Woodhead’s editorial says it ‘gives voice to women’s unfiltered experiences of this world, and other subjects on which there’s been far too much silence’. To mix metaphors, it delivers that voice in spades, though it by no means a predominantly female voice.

Alison Croggon’s column begins ‘The first time I was raped,’ builds to a passionate cry that her children ‘have to live in this world where, all the time, men hurt women, dismiss women, marginalise women, silence women, kill women’, and ends with a quietly lethal account of a ‘pleasant and intelligent man’ communicating by his manner that a protest at women being ignored was ‘a footling political point about feminism’. It’s two tough pages and Croggon has an equally fine piece online about the writing of it.

Hackers, Gamers and Cyborgs by Brendan Keogh discusses the phenomenon of Gamergate, in which a number of woman video game developers have been attacked vehemently. I’ve been aware of Gamergate as one of those online places where outrage and reciprocal vilification flourishes. This essay instructively situates it in ‘the broader patriarchal structures in which video game culture emerged’. Even though the word sexism doesn’t appear, it’s reassuring that the concept of patriarchy is still alive and doing good work.

Justin Clemens, who is a poet among other accomplishments, writes about the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s report into the CIA’s detention and interrogation program. The essay, Torturing folk, explores the implications for civil society of the current practice of and debate about torture. Paradoxically, he argues that even to debate the appropriateness of torture is in effect to close down freedom of speech.

Russell Marks puts his head above the parapet in More than taboo, arguing the case against demonising paedophiles. Specifically, government funding has been channelled primarily into identifying and punishing offenders; funding has been withdrawn from programs that provide support to survivors, including programs such as SafeCare in Perth and Cedar Cottage in New South Wales that also offered treatment to offenders, with demonstrated success in preventing recurrence.

There’s more: Fiona Wright on grieving communally on facebook; Stephen Wright on different children; Michael Bogle on The Atomic Age, an exhibition about nuclear weapons shown in Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney in 1947 and 1948 (which sent me back to Robin Gerster’s wider-ranging ‘Exile on Uranium Street: The Australian Nuclear Blues’, in Southerly No 1 2104).

There’s something irresistible about triplets: faith, hope and charity / birth, copulation and death / the three Graces / thesis, antithesis, synthesis / silence, exile, cunning … they’re everywhere. Overland‘s deputy editor Jacinda Woodhead invokes a nice one in this issue’s Editorial: for 60 years, she says, the journal has been encouraging dissent, interrogation and craft. It’s not just a pretty phrase: there’s plenty of all three in this issue, including in the first essay, Welcome to Curtin by Avan Judd Stallard, which comes craftily at Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers. It’s a memoir of working in the Curtin detention centre: prevented by the threat of seven years in prison from talking about the treatment of detainees, he describes instead the relationships and attitudes of the workers, with a short story writer’s eye for structure and significant detail.

Jennifer Mills, the fiction editor, introduces a 60th anniversary year feature, Fancy cuts, in which contemporary writers are invited to revisit short stories from the archives, invokes mother triplet: Overland has always been committed to the urgent, emerging or marginalised voices of its day. To kick off the feature, Josephine Rowe’s A small cleared space riffs surprisingly on Roma O’Brien’s When the bough breaks, a story of a hospital stillbirth that must have been harrowing when it was published in 1965, but now reads as a tale from an era of almost unbelievable callousness.

B J Thomason’s A slippery bastard deftly interrogates the myth of poet, horseman and Boer-murderer Breaker Morant, and in passing links him with two other mythologised slippery bastards. So we have triplet of Australian anti-heroes: Breaker Morant, Ned Kelly and Chopper Reed.

‘Cats are out, sloths are in’ by Jeff Sparrow is positively bursting with triplets. Subtitled Truth, politics and non-fiction, it looks at the fact-checking practice or otherwise of clickbait sites like Gawker, Buzzfeed, and Upworthy and more ‘serious’ liberal news sources like Crikey, the Conversation, the ABC. Current fact checking differs from the famous rigour of, say the New Yorker, in three significant ways (for which you’ll need to read the article). But checking facts has a limited usefulness, unless you realise they are part of a triplet: ‘facts’, theory and political practice.

There are three short stories in the Fiction section, including Anthony Panegyres’ Submerging, a parable about global warming embedded in a genuinely distressing tale of adolescent misery.

Up the back, are the three finalists in the 2013 Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize. Peter Minter, the judge, says he looks for poems in which every line ’embodies perception, ideation and the breath‘. That’s a lovely triplet. I’m sorry that I didn’t warm to any of the poems.

There are other triplets, including the three mysteries in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey in The last space waltz? by Claire Corbett, but not everything comes in threes. Four columnists are entertaining and intelligent: Alison Croggon reflects on how literacy and orality affect memory and perception (a subject Ross Gibson tackles at length in his book about William Dawes’s notebooks, 26 Views of the Starburst World); Giovanni Tiso ponders gloomily on our changing concept of the future; Mel Campbell challenges habit of thinking of writing in terms of productivity; Stephen Wright managed to make me laugh a number of times in a column devoted to wishing he was funnier. I missed Rurijk Davidson, another regular columnist – on leave perhaps?

There are two excellent pieces that I couldn’t shoehorn into my numerical scheme. Brendan Keogh’s On video game criticism, cast as a letter to Susan Sontag, manages to communicate the intellectual excitement in its eponymous field, even to someone whose video game experience doesn’t go much beyond Space Invaders, PacmanandTetris. Jill Jolliffe’s A new thalidomide? tells you more than you wish was true about hospital use of DES and other drugs, often without consent, on single mothers from the 1940s all through the 1960s in Australia, with health consequences still being discovered, including in the grandchildren of the women given the drug.

Sixty years of dissent, interrogation and craft! May the road rise to meet you, Overland, and the wind be at your back for at least 60 more.

I’m coming to this Overland late: the next issue must be just about due. Here are some brief notes with links, and because I’m late in writing the links are all live.

The reliably enjoyable regular columnists, Alison Croggon, Rjurik Davidson and Stephen Wright demonstrate that just about any life event can prompt a writer and habitual reader to reflect on readerly–writerly matters: in this case they start respectively from packing up to move house, serious injury and building a bedroom–library. Mel Campbell’s article The Writer as Performer offers a more sobering view of the writer’s life – the freelance writer as no more free of panoptic supervision than the less glamorised office worker.

In Paul Keating’s Redfern Park speech and its rhetorical legacy, Tom Clark does a very nice job of explicating the distinctive nature of that speech – different in significant ways from Paul Keating’s usual mode, and interestingly the subject of public squabbles over its authorship (the existence of the squabbles is what’s interesting rather than any proposed resolution). John Campbell, the Anti-Kim by David Brophy, explores a Victorian proto boy’s-own-adventure story and the reality behind it.

The centrepiece of this issue is the 2013 Overland Victoria University Short Story Prize for New and Emerging Writers. The three shortlisted stories are published here, along with comments from the chief judge, Jennifer Mills. All three of the stories are worth your time: Turncoat by Jennifer Down (the winner), Rush by Nic Low and The job by Robyn Dennison. I’m not quarrelling with the judges’ decision at all, but if you only click on one of them I recommend you choose Nic Low’s for sheer subversive fun.

As ever, poetry is sequestered up the back on tinted paper, and as ever it’s a feast. Treasure hunt, a prose poem by Anne Elvey, finds poetic form for the experience of a parent’s dementia. Refrigerator by Elizabeth Allen, also a prose poem, has this memorable ‘out of the mouths of babes’ moment:

There were also the brightly coloured fish in my brother’s aquarium. One day when I saw my five-year-old sister staring at the tank, I said to her, ‘The fish are pretty aren’t they?’ She said, ‘I’m not looking at the fish. I’m looking at the space between them.’

but then doesn’t take the image of cigarette as blossom anywhere. It leaves its readers wrestling with phantom meanings until we finally conclude that bud was just a misspelled butt, and no metaphor was intended. The poem about the cigarette bud is yet to be written.

This is a daring concept: a Rake-like comedy about the British atomic tests at Maralinga. Like Rake, it starts with a conversation between the series hero (here a white male army officer played by Ewen Leslie) and a prostitute (also white, played by Jessica de Gouw, I think). I've seen one episode and I'm suspending judgment, but watching it on the […]

A doco on the British atomic tests in South Australia and their impact on the southern Pitjantjatjara who lived there. Or more accurately it's a doco about those people and their land that includes the horrific and enduring damage perpetrated by those tests, and the people's ways of dealing with it.

In Iraq just after the US invasion in 2003, a former policeman is induced to work for the British because his daughter has gone missing. So there's a mystery being solved by a man caught in a hugely dangerous and compromising situation. Based on a novel by US author Elliott Colla, who has been described as a scholar of the region. My impression is that […]

This is based on a Danish movie by Susanna Bier, with Michelle Williams in the Mads Michelsen role. It starts with a group of orphans meditating beside water near Kolkata, moves to Manhattan luxury, and is full of surprises.

This poster for Douglas is shocking – why airbrush a comedian who makes constant reference to her body as not conforming to social norms of beauty? The show itself is terrific. She claims to be leaving trauma behind after Nanette, but patriarchy and other enemies are still there to be punched up to.